OSnews

As Mark Twain famously wrote, "...the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated". So with OpenVMS.VMS Software, Inc. (VSI) today announced the worldwide availability of VSI OpenVMS Version 8.4-2 (Maynard Release) operating system for HPE Integrity servers. The Maynard Release is the second by VSI. The new OS is compatible with HPE Integrity servers running the latest Intel Itanium 9500 series processor, as well as most prior generations of the Itanium processor family. VSI also reconfirmed plans to offer OpenVMS on x86-based servers."This second release reaffirms our long-term commitment to the OpenVMS platform, and builds upon our highly successful first release of OpenVMS in June of 2015," said Duane P. Harris, CEO of VMS Software. "It is the first of many exciting improvements planned for OpenVMS, including future updates to the file system, TCP/IP, and other major improvements that we look forward to sharing with our customers as we work our way through the planned roadmap."

NICTA, Australia's Information and Communications Technology Research Centre, has published a paper on the lessons learned by 20 years of work around the L4 microkernel.Some of you may remember that NICTA has developped the seL4 microkernel, one of the first - if not the first - microkernel formally verified, an important stepstone in securing computing systems against whole classes of bugs and attacks.The L4 microkernel has undergone 20 years of use and evolution. It has an active user and developer community, and there are commercial versions that are deployed on a large scale and in safety-critical systems. In this article we examine the lessons learnt in those 20 years about microkernel design and implementation. We revisit the L4 design papers, and examine the evolution of design and implementation from the original L4 to the latest generation of L4 kernels. We specifically look at seL4, which has pushed the L4 model furthest and was the first OS kernel to undergo a complete formal verification of its implementation as well as a sound analysis of worst-case execution times. We demonstrate that while much has changed, the fundamental principles of minimality, generality and high inter-process communication (IPC) performance remain the main drivers of design and implementation decisions.

In terms of planning our lives around what our TVs spit out, we've come a long way from the overly condensed pages of TV Guide. In fact, the magazine was already looking awful obsolete in the 1980s and 1990s, when cable systems around the country began dedicating entire channels to listing TV schedules.The set-top box, the power-sucking block that serves as the liaison between you and your cable company, is a common sight in homes around the country these days.But before all that was the Commodore Amiga, a device that played a quiet but important role in the cable television revolution.Absolutely fascinating - I don't think we had anything even remotely like this in The Netherlands.

Android Studio 2.0 is the fastest way to build high quality, performant apps for the Android platform, including phones and tablets, Android Auto, Android Wear, and Android TV. As the official IDE from Google, Android Studio includes everything you need to build an app, including a code editor, code analysis tools, emulators and more. This new and stable version of Android Studio has fast build speeds and a fast emulator with support for the latest Android version and Google Play Services.

RISC-V is a new general-purpose instruction-set architecture (ISA) that's BSD licensed, extensible, and royalty free. It's clean and modular with a 32-, 64-, or 128-bit integer base and various optional extensions (e.g., floating point). RISC-V is easier to implement than some alternatives - minimal RISC-V cores are roughly half the size of equivalent ARM cores - and the ISA has already gathered some support from the semiconductor industry.

On May 15th, my house will stop working. My landscape lighting will stop turning on and off, my security lights will stop reacting to motion, and my home made vacation burglar deterrent will stop working. This is a conscious intentional decision by Google/Nest.To be clear, they are not simply ceasing to support the product, rather they are advising customers that on May 15th a container of hummus will actually be infinitely more useful than the Revolv hub.Google is intentionally bricking hardware that I own.This should be absolutely illegal. I'm pretty sure Google has some EULA bullshit that "allows" them to do it, but EULAs are legal wet sand, and honestly, I just don't care. The fact Google can just get away with this shows you just how utterly warped and inherently - I'm using that word again, it's been a while - evil they really are.These companies literally do not care about you. The sooner you accept that, the less attached and to and blinded by these companies you'll be.

In this build, you can natively run Bash in Windows as announced last week at Build 2016. To do this, you first need to turn on Developer Mode via Settings > Update & security > For developers. Then search for "Windows Features" and choose "Turn Windows features on or offâ and enable Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta). To get Bash installed, open Command Prompt and type "bash".I'm really curious to find out what fans of Bash and Linux command line tools think of this after actually using it.

And yet, from our collective memories, we all believe there was some sort of Commodore product in nearly half of US households that owned a home computer, not to mention sales worldwide. The "other people" had various Atari computers or green monochrome Apple II or II+, Tandy or, ultimately DOS Frankensteins. We'll be nice and not mention the sad Coleco Adam, since most everyone has forgotten this lonely child. But are our memories real? Was what we saw around us true, or were we living in a bubble?I played games on a C64 when I was very young, but I don't think I've ever seen a real Amiga (aside from this stuff).

We are all absolutely unique and we want different things. Vivaldi web browser lets you do things your way by adapting to you and not the other way around. You prefer the browser tabs placed at the bottom or on the side of the window? - You prefer a different address bar location? Go ahead and customize your preferences be it your keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, appearance and so on.It's supposed to scratch that Opera itch, but I know just how demanding Opera users are. I am really curious to see if Vivaldi will ever be able to walk in those footsteps.

Apple has added two new keys labeled "isFirstParty" and "isFirstPartyHideableApp" in iTunes metadata. These two new values started showing up a few weeks ago on every app in the App Store. The iTunes metadata is where all the information about an app is stored. It shows things like the date it was released, the App Store category it's in, its size, etc. The new keys suggest the ability to remove apps such as Stocks, Compass, and Voice Messages is coming very soon.Hiding is not removing, but at least this will solve part of the fast-growing unremovable crapware problem on iOS.

It's been several weeks since Ray Tomlinson, best known for the invention of email, passed on. Email, however, represents only a very small portion of his work and contributions.While writing a research paper on possible new methods to reduce and eradicate malware, I came across a bit of intriguing history whose available details did not satisfy my curiosity, and I needed to know more than what the internet had to offer. The event in question was the creation of Creeper, a piece of software created in 1971 by Bob Thomas that, according to most sources, is the world's first computer virus. There hasn't been a lot of information available on the internet regarding Creeper except that it was created to "infect" computers running the TENEX operating system on ARPAnet. It would cause the machine to print "I'M THE CREEPER. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN." Then Ray Tomlinson created Reaper whose sole purpose was to seek out and remove Creeper from the machines it had "infected".I wanted to know more, though. Why was Creeper created in the first place? Did it cause problems? Was it an annoyance to those managing the machines it affected? Should it really be considered the first virus (technically worm, if that)? In late 2014 I ended up finding Ray Tomlinson on LinkedIn of all places and asked him if I could ask a few questions about Creeper and Reaper. He very kindly obliged. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Over the past year, we've been progressively rolling out Signal Protocol support for all WhatsApp communication across all WhatsApp clients. This includes chats, group chats, attachments, voice notes, and voice calls across Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Nokia S40, Nokia S60, Blackberry, and BB10.As of today, the integration is fully complete. Users running the most recent versions of WhatsApp on any platform now get full end to end encryption for every message they send and every WhatsApp call they make when communicating with each other. This includes all the benefits of the Signal Protocol - a modern, open source, forward secure, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems, designed to make end-to-end encrypted messaging as seamless as possible.WhatsApp is the most popular messaging protocol in the world (in my own country it's effectively at 100% market share), so to see it do end-to-end encryption is a huge deal.

Subgraph, an open source security company based in Montreal, has published the alpha release of Subgraph OS, which is designed to with security, anonymity AND usability in mind."Subgraph OS was designed from the ground-up to reduce the risks in endpoint systems so that individuals and organizations around the world can communicate, share, and collaborate without fear of surveillance or interference by sophisticated adversaries through network borne attacks," its creators say.Not the first time we've talked about it.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE. This is the third release of the stable/10 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE and introduces some new features.It's got a ton of improvements to the UEFI boot loader, the Linux compatibility layer, and a whole lot more.

You might be asking yourself, less stripes? No, not the colorful stripes on your breadbin badge. We're talking about the stripes on the video image. The same stripes that we've all become accustomed to over the many years of playing Commodore 64 games, watching demos and carrying on with modems and BBS's. These stripes, which are actually interference, come in a variety of flavors: horizontal, vertical, and checkerboard patterns. The intensity of the stripes also varies from machine to machine. Some say with that these stripes become even more apparent when using a C64 with a modern LCD monitor.Whether you love them or hate them, there is a solution for easing or even completely eliminating the stripes all together. The user e5frog on lemon64.com came up with a design for a carrier PCB that would sit between the VIC-II and the motherboard. It's purpose was to invert certain signals back into itself, each with an adjustable degree. These signals AEC, PHI0 and chroma are all thought to contribute to the stripes on the final output image of the C64. It's a fascinating discussion that I urge you to read.

White male terrorism is the white underbelly of the gaming community, meant to terrify and disrupt the lives of those who threaten the status quo by race, gender, or sexuality. It succeeds because the majority of men in the community are too cowardly to stand against the bullies and the terrorists. At best, these cowards ignore the problem. At worst, they join the terrorists in blaming their victims for the abuse. The point of online terrorism is that it is endless, omnipresent, and anonymous. I have no way of knowing whether the person with whom Iâm gaming is safe or the person who wants to âslit [my] throat and fuck the gash until [I] drown in cumâ. Knowing that the person sending those e-mails could be anyone and the community will not support me if/when I am attacked keeps myself and many others from the hobby.Happy Sunday.

In 2016 Apple has become a very different kind of company - the most valuable company in the world, it so happens. Over the past 40 years, Apple has gone from a struggling upstart challenging IBM and Microsoft to being a dominant platform vendor. A company founded by two friends who bonded over a love of hacking the long-distance phone network has become a major economic gatekeeper engaged in historic policy fights with the government. It is a remarkable, improbable success story.After forty years, Apple is doing better than ever before - yet to me, it feels like they are doing worse than ever. To me, they reached their zenith about 12-15 years ago. I don't like companies for how popular they are, how widespread they are, how successful they are. All those things are irrelevant to me. They have no bearing on my enjoyment of products.To me, the highpoint of Apple was the PowerPC G4 era. The iMac G4, the iBook G4, the PowerMac G4, and the Cube. I owned all four of those, and still feel remorse for getting rid of them. I liked Apple because of the soul and emotion it used to put into its machines.I like things that aren't perfect. I like things that are inherently broken. It takes imperfection to notice perfection. I like things that could be better - but make up for it with a sense of uniqueness, personality, charm, quirkiness. Apple doesn't make products like that anymore. Everything they make now is cold, calculated, beancounted. Their products no longer have any soul, any emotion, any individuality. It's an endless parade of cold, dead metal.I wish they'd loosen up a bit.

Baldur's Gate is one of the most revered RPG series in video game history. It helped write the book on Western-style RPGs, putting a focus on memorable followers and party-based combat, and tossing it all in a blender with a dungeon and a dragon. Nearly two decades later, it's back.Beamdog is a small studio, but they have grand - verging on grandiose - plans. The company was founded by Trent Oster, BioWare co-founder, and Cameron Tofer, former BioWare lead programmer. They've been quietly tinkering away on Enhanced Editions of classic BioWare and Black Isle RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, and Icewind Dale, culminating in today's release of an all-new expansion, Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. Oh, and they also recently brought on David Gaider, aka That Guy Who Made A Lot Of The Best Words In Dragon Age And Other BioWare RPGs For 17 Years.The Infinity engine games - the Baldur's Gate games, Icewind Dale, and of course the best one, Planescape: Torment - all make up the first golden age of RPGs. And today, we are lucky enough to witness the second golden age of RPGs, with games like Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland II, and Torment: Tides of Numenera, and cleaned-up versions of the classics. It's a really great time to be a fan of classic RPGs.And it's about to get even better."Basically, Baldur's Gate III, every two weeks when we call [Dungeons & Dragons publisher] Wizards of the Coast, something comes up," said Daigle. "The Baldur's Gate III thing, when are we going to do that? I think the answer is when the right people and the right partners line up, something big will happen."Yes please.

Microsoft kicked off its Build developer conference in San Francisco with a focus on Windows 10, bots, and developer tools, but there was something missing: Windows Phone. A single demo of Skype running on a Windows Phone was the only time a phone running Windows 10 Mobile appeared for longer than a few seconds, and it felt like Microsoft was more focused on Windows 10 for Xbox and HoloLens. I got the chance to speak to Windows chief Terry Myerson briefly after today's keynote, and it's clear Microsoft focus isn't on phones this year."We're fully committed to that 4-inch screen, there will be a time for it to be our focus, but right now it's part of the family but it's not the core of where I hope to generate developer interest over the next year," explains Myerson. "There's no lack of recognition to realize how important that form factor is, but for Microsoft with Windows and for our platform it's the wrong place for us to lead."So, like any other year then.

This isn't Bash or Ubuntu running in a VM. This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It's fast and lightweight and it's the real binaries. This is a genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It's fast and it's lightweight. The binaries are downloaded by you - using apt-get - just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on. This is brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools like me.Windows just got cancer.Update: here's more information on the technical implementation. In short, it's a sort-of reverse WINE - it translates Linux syscalls to Windows syscalls in real time.

According to sources at Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, and Microsoft, you'll soon be able to run Ubuntu on Windows 10.This will be more than just running the Bash shell on Windows 10. After all, thanks to programs such as Cygwin or MSYS utilities, hardcore Unix users have long been able to run the popular Bash command line interface (CLI) on Windows.With this new addition, Ubuntu users will be able to run Ubuntu simultaneously with Windows. This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10.We'll learn more today, but this sounds like a pretty cool thing to have - and something that can replace Cygwin.

I'm happy to announce the release of Sortix 1.0. This is the first self-hosting and installable release.Sortix is a small self-hosting operating-system aiming to be a clean and modern POSIX implementation. It is a hobbyist operating system written from scratch with its own base system, including kernel and standard library, as well as ports of third party software.We first reported on Sortix (version 0.9) a year ago.

After months of work, the FBI finally has a way into the San Bernardino iPhone. In a court filing today, prosecutors told the court the new method for breaking into the phone is sound, and Apple's assistance is no longer required. "The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook's iPhone," the filing reads, "and therefore no longer requires assistance from Apple." The filing provides no further details on the nature of the new method. Still, the result effectively finishes the court fight that has consumed Apple since February.This is one of the strangest cases in technology I've seen in a long time.Hunch: the FBI realised it would never win the case, and got out when it still could.

OpenBSD 5.9 has been released a few days early! As always, OpenBSD doesn't do a very good job of summarising the most important changes in this new release, but that's okay - OpenBSD isn't targeted at people like me who know very little about the BSDs. It doesn't really matter - those of you using OpenBSD were probably already aware of what was coming anyway, and if not, the release notes will still make complete sense to you.

"Just a few more months" has been the mantra of virtual reality since people started getting excited about the Oculus Rift, and saying it after the headset is released feels like either a huge cop-out or a sign that the VR we want may never actually arrive. But it's impossible to think of all the unreleased Oculus Touch experiences I've tried - like three-dimensional painting tool Quill, Old West shooting gallery Dead & Buried, and a VR version of Rock Band - and not feel like the Rift's best days are still ahead of it.For the first time, though, there's something to do while you wait. The high cost of buying and running high-end VR headsets makes them inaccessible to many people, and the Rift in particular is relentlessly focused on gaming. Within these limitations, though, the Rift makes a good case for seated VR, and it lays a solid foundation for what's to come. The headset you can buy today is not Oculus' most ambitious vision for virtual reality - but itâs a vision that Oculus has successfully delivered on.I really don't know what to make of the current crop of VR headsets. I just don't see the appeal in strapping an ugly hardware monstrosity on your head to play a few video games or watch some movies. There are several weird disconnects; you can look around - but not in 360 degrees, because the cables make that impossible. You can move your head to look - but you need buttons to walk. It feels more like a glorified display setup than VR, really.On top of that, while I love to dive into a carefully crafted game or movie world mentally, I wouldn't want to do so physically. When you're using one of these things, you are effectively wearing a blindfold, with no idea of what's happening around you. I don't know about other people, but to me, that just sounds terrifying - and a little distopian.I appreciate the science and engineering that's currently being done on VR, and I'm in no way saying this won't go anywhere - just that it doesn't seem like my personal cup of tea. On top of that, there are probably a ton of non-gaming uses where technology like this could really shine.Meanwhile, I'm waiting for VR to grow up into the holodeck.

A-EON Technology is pleased to announce the upcoming release of Warp3D Nova, its advanced 2D/3D shader based graphics system for AmigaOS 4 supporting selected RadeonHD 7xxx and Radeon Rx graphics cards with Southern Islands series GPUs.Warp3D Nova delivers shader-based 3D graphics acceleration along with perpixel lighting and fluid rendering of larger vertex arrays as well as many other advanced graphics features. The addition of programmable shaders gives AmigaOS 4 developers an exciting new world of graphics possibilities. Warp3D Nova is a huge leap forward over earlier Warp3D and MiniGL implementations.The AmigaOS clearly isn't the state of the art any longer - in case you've been living under a rock - but I am always surprised by the amount of development the platform is still seeing. Great work.

After the first few Ubuntu smartphones, it only made sense for Ubuntu to find its way to a tablet as well. The Aquaris M10 can now be preordered, and has the ability to switch between tablet mode and desktop mode, providing an interface for each.When you switch to desktop mode, the scopes become windows which you can navigate using the touchscreen or with a mouse. You can also connect the tablet to a monitor to view your work on a larger screen. This convergence facilitates multitasking and expands the tabletâs possibilities as a work tool. What's more, it includes apps like LibreOffice and GIMP Image Editor, so you can use it without restrictions in a professional environment.We're getting ever closer to an interface which automatically adapts to whatever screen or input devices it's connected to, which is something I personally would go for in a heartbeat. I find it incredibly silly that we're lugging around a phone and a laptop, have a desktop at home, and maybe even a tablet, when many of these devices are more than powerful enough to take on almost all computing tasks of any of them.The Ubuntu tablet comes in two flavours, and starts at â¬259.

The release of the iPhone SE is emblematic of the "boringness" of the smartphone landscape. For the last few years, the only thing exciting about new smartphone releases was that they kept getting bigger. Now the tide has turned. An article at the Atlantic makes an interesting parallel: the codex, or the innovation now known as "the book" hasn't seen many innovations in centuries, but that doesn't mean that books are boring. It just means that the innovation is at the edges. The article points at the release of the Caterpillar S60 smartphone, designed for industrial use and featuring a thermal imaging camera, as indicative of a new trend of specialization that might make the mobile computing market interesting as it extends into ever more narrow niches.

Now here's a blast from the (somewhat recent) past: the Trinity Desktop Environment. TDE is a fork of the last available release of the KDE 3.x series, coming into existence in 2008. The project's been under steady development ever since, and the most recent release is R14.0.3. since this is just a maintenance release, it might be more fitting to look at the release notes for R14.0.0, the base release, from december 2014.Unlike previous releases TDE R14.0.0 has been in development for over two years. This extended development period has allowed us to create a better, more stable and more feature-rich product than previous TDE releases. R14 is brimming with new features, such as a new hardware manager based on udev (HAL is no longer required), full network-manager 0.9 support, a brand new compositor (compton), built-in threading support, and much more!Honestly, I have no idea how many people still see value in a maintained KDE 3.x desktop, but since I've personally always been a fan of KDE 3 (KDE 4 never really managed to convince me), I'm glad his project is still around offering the option for those among us who want to use KDE 3.

Apple announced on Thursday that it was working with the entertainer Will.i.am and two veteran TV executives, Ben Silverman and Howard T. Owens, on a new show that will spotlight the app economy."One of the things with the app store that was always great about it was the great ideas that people had to build things and create things," Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet software and services, said in an interview.So a series about overworked, stressed out, underpaid, barely getting by developers who are at the mercy of Apple's approval and rejection process, and who worry about Apple stealing their idea, banning them, and then implementing said idea in iOS+1?So a drama, then. I'm sure 2009, when apps still mattered, is going to love this.

Two high-profile companies are shutting down development for two platforms this week. First, Facebook has announced it is ceasing development of the Facebook and WhatsApp applications for BlackBerry OS.The app landscape continues to evolve, and in ways that are not always within our control. Recently, Facebook made the decision to discontinue support of their essential APIs for BlackBerry and WhatsApp announced they would end support for BlackBerry 10 and BBOS at the end of 2016.In addition, Twitter announced it is ceasing development of its only application for desktop Windows, TweetDeck.To better focus on enhancing your TweetDeck experience, we'll no longer support a standalone Windows app. If you use Windows, you'll still be able to visit TweetDeck on the web - nothing is changing about TweetDeck itself, just where you access it from. This change will take effect on April 15th.TweetDeck was the only desktop Twitter client the company ever supported (it bought TweetDeck several years ago), and while it is far from perfect, it's the only desktop Twitter client that was halfway decent. Twitter never created a proper Win32 client, and neither did anyone else. They do have a Metro client developed by a third party, but it's pretty terrible and a horrible user experience on a desktop machine.Unlikely as it is, I'm still stubbornly holding out hope somebody creates a nice and elegant Win32 Twitter client, because with the shutdown of TweetDeck, I don't have any options for using Twitter on the computing platform I use the most (i.e., Windows).

As a follow-up to Genode's 16.02 release, the project just published an in-depth article describing the experience with the RISC-V architecture and the steps taken to enable Genode on this platform.The article is targeted at enthusiasts interested in the practical use of RISC-V and can also be used as a guideline on how to bring Genode to a different CPU architecture.

Yesterday, the government made a surprising retreat in the San Bernardino encryption case, after an unnamed source revealed a new method of breaking iPhone lockscreen protections. After a hastily assembled conference call, the parties agreed to put the court order on hold until it could be determined whether Apple's help was still necessary.But excerpts from a court transcript of that proceeding, published here for the first time, show the government was far less prepared for the new method than some have assumed. "We only learned about this possibility today, this morning," Assistant US Attorney Tracy Wilkison told the judge in the conference call. "We have a good faith basis at this point in order to bring it up." That timeline is consistent with recent court filings, which show the first successful demonstration of the method coming that Sunday.What a weird story. Jonathan Zdziarksi has a theory about the supposed hack.

Vizio, the successful American TV maker, has created a very interesting solution to the smart TV problem. Instead of building yet another smart TV platform or using Android TV, the company has worked very closely with Google these past two years to integrate Chromecast - renamed today to just Google Cast - right into the TV. Vizio then ships a pretty good Android tablet alongside their TV, with all the Google Cast stuff you already know from Chromecast built right in.The company's solution is the Vizio Tablet Remote, which isn't a remote at all: it's a six-inch tablet running stock Android Lollipop on an eight-core Snapdragon processor with a very nice 1080p screen, a soft-touch back, dual speakers, and a wireless charging cradle. It lacks any dedicated buttons to control the TV - it only turns into a "remote" when you open Vizio's new SmartCast app or kick off a streaming session from another app that supports Cast, like Hulu or Netflix.But you don't have to cast anything to the TV at all - after all, it's just an Android tablet. You can go ahead and watch Netflix on the Smart Remote if you want. You can download apps from the Play Store. You can cast Netflix to the TV and use the tablet to check Twitter. You can let a kid play games on the tablet and control the entire TV with the SmartCast app on your iPhone. The tablet is basically another small TV.This is exactly what a smart TV should be. I have a Chromecast - the current hockey puck model - and it's probably one of the best technology products I've ever owned. It's so simple and elegant, and it just works. Now that I have it, I can't imagine ever having gone without it. Instead of shoving yet another ugly box underneath my TV or learning and installing apps on yet another platform, I can just use the damn phone in my pocket. Why would I want it any other way?Vizio and Google have been smart about this whole thing too. The Google Cast portion of the TV is isolated from everything else, and updates comes straight from Google, so it's always up to date and in line with any other Google Cast device.The big upsaide for both Vizio and consumers? They don't have to worry at all about getting deals with content creators and owners.But by dropping any desire to put apps on the TV itself, Vizio completely sidesteps the platform war entirely. Every app in the Android and the iOS app stores that supports Google Cast is a P-Series app. And iOS and Android apps are the apps developers care about most, so they're often the best apps from a given service.That means when Netflix and Hulu update their Android and iOS apps, they're also updating the P-Series experience. Vizio doesn't need to beg HBO and ESPN to support its TVs anymore, because they already support Google Cast - and thus the P-Series. There's no NFL Sunday Ticket app for the Apple TV, but the iOS and Android apps support Cast, so P-Series owners can pay to stream football.Brilliant, and the future of smart TVs. These silly anachronistic glorified settop boxes like Android TV and the Apple TV? They are relics, old-world thinking. A TV should be a dumb screen ready to receive input from my phone or tablet, and Vizio built just that.All they need to do now is ship to Europe.

Apple's new iPad Pro is the twelfth iPad to be released since the original debuted back in 2010, and it borrows features from two of Apple's existing tablets. The new iPad Pro has the size and weight of the iPad Air 2 - 9.7-inches, which Apple notes is by far the most popular of its three iPad size choices - while bringing over the power and accessories of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro launched last year. (Yes, the new iPad Pro and the existing iPad Pro have the same name - you'll have to get used to identifying them by size.)Apple's event today was one of the most telling events it has held in years, and I specifically chose the new iPad Pro 9.7" to focus on. As far as products and announcements go, the event wasn't all that monumental; it was the tone and wording that really set this event apart from all others. This wasn't Apple talking about new products today - this was Apple talking about how it sees the future of personal computing.On several occasions during the event, Apple referred to the iPad Pro - both the new 9.7" model and the old 12.9" model - as their vision for the future of personal computing, and Tim Cook referred to the 12.9" model as a "giant step" toward the "future of computing".Read between the lines of today's event, and you could clearly see the writing on the wall: after letting the Mac and specifically OS X languish since the release of iOS, and after internal struggles about which of the two - or both - platforms to focus on going forward, it seems like Apple is letting the world know that it finally made a choice, and that choice is iOS.I'm not basing this solely on today's event, of course, but also on the lack of development on OS X, the lack of consistent Mac hardware updates over the years, and insights I'm getting from people who... Know Apple things better than we do. I already mentioned it in the previous news item, and I'm going to state it plainly and bluntly again to drive the point home: as far as Apple is concerned, the Mac and OS X are the past. Their eventual death won't be sudden or clear-cut, but the gradual decline of the platform's importance in Apple has been ongoing for a long time now, and will only accelerate from here on out.I'm not saying this is either good or bad - those of you who follow me on Twitter and are intimately aware of my 'life' with iOS can guess in which camp I belong - I'm just spelling out what's pretty obvious between the lines. I'll leave it up to you if this makes you happy or sad.We've got an interesting number of years ahead.

As a major update to the iOS 9 operating system, iOS 9.3 introduces several new functions, important bug fixes, and feature refinements. Perhaps the biggest change is the introduction of Night Shift mode, designed to reduce the amount of blue light iOS users are exposed to in the evening by shifting the iPhone or iPad display to a warmer (yellower) color spectrum.Still the only major upside for me to switching from Android to iOS: I already have iOS 9.3 installed.

We'll get to the instructions, but first let's talk about what's actually here. Freeform Window Mode is just what we imagined. It's a dead ringer for Remix OS - multiple Android apps floating around inside windows - and might be the beginnings of a desktop operating system. It works on Android N phones and tablets, and once the mode is enabled, you'll see an extra button on thumbnails in the Recent Apps screen. To the right of the "X" button that pops up after a second or two, there will be a square shape - the same ugly placeholder art Google used for the split screen mode in the Android M Developer Preview.Press the square symbol for an app and you'll be whisked away to a screen showing that app in a floating window that sits on top of your home screen wallpaper. The windows aren't floating above the Android desktop; it's just a blank wallpaper without any of your icons or widgets. The floating apps all have title bars like in Recent Apps. You can drag the apps around by the title bars or use the close and maximize buttons. Apps can be resized exactly how you would expect - press or hold on the edge of and all and move your finger, and you'll see the app change shape. Just like in split screen mode, apps will auto-switch between their tablet and phone layouts (with some apps dealing with this better than others). You can only resize in one direction at a time though; there doesn't seem to be a corner hotspot that will let you adjust the width and height.It's honestly kind of amazing that we get to see both Apple and Google work on scaling up their mobile operating systems for desktop use, with the eventual end goal of replacing Chrome OS and OS X (get used to it, people - OS X is on its way out), and unify everything from desktop, to laptop, to tablet, to phone, in a single user interface that scales from top to bottom.It's what Microsoft tried to do by scaling down, which honestly didn't pan out very well. We'll see if scaling up is a better approach, but exciting and interesting as it is to see this take shape before our very eyes, I still have my considerable doubts.

What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown, a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. From the outside, this charger is almost a perfect match for an Apple charger, but disassembling the charger shows that it is very different on the inside. It has a much simpler design that lacks quality features of the genuine charger, and has major safety defects.Fascinating article, and much like his teardown of a real MacBook charger, filled with interesting information. It also comes with a warning: don't use counterfeit chargers. You may save a few euros, but it could easily cost you much more than that if things go bad.

Redox is a general purpose operating system and surrounding ecosystem written in pure Rust. Our aim is to provide a fully functioning Linux replacement, without the bad parts.We have modest compatibility with Linux syscalls, allowing Redox to run many Linux programs without virtualization.We take inspiration from Plan9, Minix, and BSD. We are trying to generalize various concepts from other systems, to get one unified design. We will speak about this some more in the Design chapter.Redox runs on real hardware today.

Technology companies could face civil penalties for refusing to comply with court orders to help investigators access encrypted data under draft legislation nearing completion in the U.S. Senate, sources familiar with continuing discussions told Reuters on Wednesday.

The first killer app, VisiCalc, came out in 1979. It turned an ordinary Apple II into a financial planning tool that was more powerful and flexible than anything the world had ever seen. A refined version of this spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3, became the killer app that put IBM PCs in offices and homes around the world. The Macintosh, which floundered in 1985 after early adopter sales trailed off, found a profitable niche in the new world of desktop publishing with two killer apps: Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe Photoshop.To keep up with the Joneses, the Amiga needed a killer app to survive - it found one with the Video Toaster.This series has been running for a long, long time, and is still every bit as great.

When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pushing to get a waiver allowing her to use a BlackBerry like President Barack Obama back in 2009, the National Security Agency had a very short list of devices approved for classified communications. It was two devices built for the Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device (SME PED) program. In fact, those devices were the only thing anyone in government without an explicit security waiver (like the one the president got, along with his souped-up BlackBerry 8830) could use until as recently as last year to get mobile access to top secret encrypted calls and secure e-mail.Despite $18 million in development contracts for each of the vendors selected to build the competing SME PED phones (or perhaps because of it), the resulting devices were far from user-friendly. The phones - General Dynamics' Sectéra Edge and L3 Communications' Guardian - were not technically "smart phones," but instead were handheld personal digital assistants with phone capability, derived from late 1990s and early 2000s technology that had been hardened for security purposes - specifically, Windows CE technology.This is an absolutely fascinating piece of technological history here. Can you imagine using one of these monstrous things?

Today, we're pleased to begin the roll-out of Windows 10 Mobile to select Windows Phone 8.1 devices. There are a lot of great new features in Windows 10 Mobile, like Continuum, Windows Hello and Cortana.The current list is restricted to a subset of Lumia devices, and it seems like the first generation of Windows Phone 8.x devices - such as my HTX 8X - won't be getting the Windows 10 update. Microsoft will also disable insider builds for these first generation devices.

Icaros Desktop 2.1 might be named "the handlers release", but also "the YouTube one", since the best enhancement over the previous versions are the addition of new NTFS and EX-FAT filesystem handlers and the free, read-only version of GoogleDrive handler, a "driver" which allows to mount your Google Drive handler onto AROS as if it was a normal USB stick or a CD-ROM. But that's not the only good news: we've talked bout YouTube because Deadwood did the miracle again, and we can now enjoy HTML5 video as well, playing your favourite contents from YouTube and other sites. But there have been lots of little/big additions, fixed and enhancements.Icaros Desktop is a 'distribution' of AROS, the easiest (and cheapest, as in free) way to get a taste of an AmigaOS-like operating system on generic hardware.

The attack, which was targeted at US users, hit websites including the New York Times, the BBC, AOL and the NFL over the weekend. Combined, the targeted sites have traffic in the billions of visitors.The malware was delivered through multiple ad networks, and used a number of vulnerabilities, including a recently-patched flaw in Microsoft's former Flash competitor Silverlight, which was discontinued in 2013.That's why we have adblockers.

I'm happy to announce that Qt 5.6.0 has been released today! This release has taken a bit longer to finish than we originally expected, mostly because we put a lot of new infrastructure in place, allowing us to make Qt 5.6 a Long Term Supported (LTS) release. With that, Qt 5.6 (LTS) will be receiving patch releases with security updates and bug fixes for the next three years, in parallel to upcoming Qt versions.

Linux 4.5 has been released. This release adds a new copy_file_range() system call that allows to make copies of files without transferring data through userspace; experimental Powerplay power management for modern Radeon GPUs; scalability improvements in the Btrfs free space handling; support GCC's Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (-fsanitize=undefined); Forwarded Error Correction support in the device-mapper's verity target; support for the MADV_FREE flag in madvise(); the new cgroup unified hierarchy is considered stable; scalability improvements for SO_REUSEPORT UDP sockets; scalability improvements for epoll, and better memory accounting of sockets in the memory controller. There are also new drivers and many other small improvements. There are also new drivers and many other small improvements. Here is the full list of changes.

The wall separating "foreign" intelligence operations from domestic criminal investigations has finally, fully collapsed. The FBI is now acting on a rule change initiated by the Bush administration, and finally massaged into actionable policy by Obama: Now, FBI agents can query the NSA's database of Americans' international communications, collected without warrants pursuant to Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. That law put congress' stamp of approval on the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which was widely denounced as totalitarian when the New York Times' James Risen exposed it to the world in 2005.Remember when they told us this wouldn't be a slippery slope?Cute.

The major new architectural feature of this release has been the introduction of the Qubes Management infrastructure, which is based on the popular Salt management software.In Qubes 3.1, this management stack makes it possible to conveniently control system-wide Qubes configuration using centralized, declarative statements. Declarative is the key word here: it makes creating advanced configurations significantly simpler. (The user or administrator needs only to specify what they want to get, rather than how they want to get it).

Security update package MS16-023 for Internet Explorer doesn't only contain security patches, but also a few other things, including: "This update adds functionality to Internet Explorer 11 on some computers that lets users learn about Windows 10 or start an upgrade to Windows 10."Ghacks.net writes:Microsoft does not reveal what this means, or what this has to do with Internet Explorer. According to Woody Leonhard over at Infoworld, the update pushes a banner on Internet Explorer 11's New Tab Page advertising the company's new operating system Windows 10.Unfortunately the ads can't be uninstalled without uninstalling the whole security update package.